I must admit, I’ve seen this thread many times but I’ve avoided it because–and I know this is an unpopular opinion–I’m not much of a zombie person. But this was, as several posters before me have said, surprisingly addictive and enjoyable!

-I know that this is the combat beta, but as Laytonia said, it would be fun to have some little additions in combat besides simply missing the zombies.
-Probably my biggest complaint would be with the teaming up aspect. I love having someone else to rely on, but I wonder if it would be possible to be able to see the stats of the PC’s partner? I know it’ll mention if Butch/Laura gets blood on their face, and it’ll say that he or she is hurt, but if there was a concrete way to know that THIS is when we need to really start worrying about giving him/her serum or a first aid kit, then that could solve some blindsiding issues when all of a sudden, one’s partner becomes a zombie, etc.

But overall, this is great–I’m really excited to see the final product!

But surely the point of it is that your playing through slightly blindsided, it ruins the realism if you just start seeing butch as a big number 35 instead of a living breathing person. Just my opinion

That is true, Kelfezond! Perhaps it’s better to not include statistics for the infection rate–that might be the most realistic option. But I feel if this was an actual real life scenario, then we would at least be able to tell by looking, in a very general sense, how urgently our partner was wounded. Or maybe I’m overthinking this all.

At any rate, the game works, as far as I’ve gotten, smoothly, just the way it is. Anything else is icing on an already tasty cake.

First of all, thanks for playing tveldore!
I’ve given the issue of team mate infection some thought and I’m aware there’s room for improvement.
First, let me explain why the teammate sometimes becomes a zombie without warning:
The Virus in this zombie game doesn’t immediately turn people into zombies when they’re bitten. You can be infected without the illness breaking out. The infection stat you see on your stat screen, infection, is the rate of infection in your body and equals the chance the illness, let’s call it “zombiism”, breaks out. After each combat, a random number between 1 and 100 is generated. If it’s under your infection stat, the illness breaks out and your “zombiism” increases. For the player, there are three stages of zombiism. During the first two, you get warnings with increasing urgency and the illness can still be healed by taking serum.
The NPCs, however, are less resilient and become zombies as soon as zombiism breaks out. So even if they only have an infection of 10, there is a 10 % chance after each combat that they are turned into zombies. You are warned when their infection goes over 30 and again 50 percent, but by then it’s often too late.
The rather obvious solution is to make the NPCs zombiism multi-stage as well. As of the next version, an outbreak will give you a warning and a last chance to buy some serum before your beloved buddy turns into a fleshhungry killing machine. Hopefully, this will not completely remove the threat of zombiism. Optimally, players won’t always be able to afford serum right away and will have to keep fighting in the hope of earning enough money, all the while aware that the guy/gal fighting next to them might turn on them after combat.

Thanks for the response, Simski! I’m the kind of person who really likes knowing all of the little technicalities of games, and that was interesting. It’s obvious you’ve put a lot of thought and work into this!

I’ve never gotten a message warning about impending zombiism for either of the NPCs, but I have run into a bug on a few separate occasions that produces this error message:

Would that be what you’re referring to about the warning message for your NPC? Right now it isn’t working, whatever it’s meant to be. At any rate, I know this is just a beta of a fuller game to come, and your time might be better spent working on that, because the aforementioned bug is a little technicality with an NPC and as far as I can tell, the rest of your combat system works quite well.

Also, I’ve definitely run into the problem of not having enough money to buy serum right away on a few occasions, which did provide a sense of urgency. But upon reaching a higher level, when victory is rather guaranteed, this obviously wasn’t a problem. I really did enjoy the desperation factor of fighting while infected. I know you mentioned earlier that you originally had serum priced a bit more expensively, and I might suggest increasing the price a bit again, if that sense of impending doom is what you’re going for.

This got really long. Hopefully it was of some use to you and good luck on your next updates!

Change 1: Infection for companions is now changed to work as I discussed above. Hopefully, the zombification of companions won’t be as surprising and seemingly arbitrary as it used to. Big thanks to everyone who gave their input on the matter!

Change 2: There is now an inventory system. You can own up to five weapons, equip them to yourself or your companions and sell them when they become obsolete.

I don’t know if anyone else has this, but when I first got Butch, even before any fighting, he ‘looked’ infected (sweating, pasty, etc. Unless that’s just how he’s supposed to look?). His appearance didn’t change after I gave him serum. I gave him serum after we had fought and he said he needed some… and still looked the same. He repeated that he needed more serum after the fight, too. Does he just have a very low infection threshhold?

@chibz, once again this was my fault. I accidentally uploaded testing stats, where the infection for npcs was set to 90 from the beginning for testing purposes. Thanks for noticing this, I fixed it and butch should be clean now when you get him.

I really like it, and look forward to this system with a campaign/story. Can’t help but think this could be done more intuitively with just some Javascript. Equipping weapons and using meds seem really cumbersome, any way to streamline the process? Looking in “Check your stats” instead of “Inventory” is confusing for medicating yourself. I do like that you’ve kept the options limited to about 7 per page at most, but can you collapse some of the steps for equipping, etc.?

thanks for your feedback! The inventory system is indeed pretty cumbersome. It’s not easy to write something intuitive using just ChoiceScript, maybe JavaScript is the way to go there. I’ll work on it as soon as I have some time.

Hey i played you beta and i liked it. i do have a two suggestion. 1) i think the splash on the ketana is a little to high. idk if thats just me but i wouldnt think a sword would cause more splash then a hammer. 2) if you felt like you had the time or would want to make it so its can be harder while still not making it to hard, you could have a difficulty option where for the harder difficulty you tweck the prices so they are more the zombies are stronger and harder and have more health and your more susceptible to infestion. idk if that would be hard to do or not

I tweaked the splash of the weapons a bit, hopefully it’s more balanced now. The Katana still has a significantly higher splash than the hammer, though, since I’m using “Kill Bill”-Katana-Physics.
Adding a difficulty selection is a great idea and shouldn’t be too hard to implement. I’m working on the full game right now, and I’ll probably incorporate difficulty there.

no problem. and oo ok. hey if you take a break i have 2 zombie related things you might like 1) World War Z by Max Brooks it depicts the world before during and after a zombie Apocalypse (assuming the worlds governments were able to stop it.) and 2) http://armorgames.com/play/10572/rebuild its a zombie game were you have a coalition of survivors and you try to keep control of a city. im suggesting these cause they might give you some inspiration and i think you like things involving zombies